The New "Sons of Liberty"

Study any account of the growth of America and one fact always jumps out at
you -- the heroic self-determination of the men and women who shaped the events
of our history. Throughout those sprawling colonial years to the trying times
of the Revolution, and beyond to the boom towns of the West, the railroad age,
Edison, Henry Ford and the roaring twenties, there is observable in the people
of these eras an unrelenting sense of self-reliance and willingness to take
risks. It is not a history of government social agendas with their inevitable
concomitants of futility and despair. It is a history of adventurous, self-assured
individuals in pursuit of great accomplishments, of personal daring and discovery
-- a tale of the human spirit in quest of the ideal. The dominant figures that
built this country were not leveling bureaucrats, but dynamic entrepreneurs,
pioneers, scientists, inventors, immigrants -- bold, ingenious men willing
to rise or fall on their own merits and the strength of their faith in a just
Providence.

They fought a war with a ragged little army against a mighty empire, and won.
They wrote a Constitution for all the ages, and crossed a vast and death dealing
frontier with nothing but covered wagons and their own personal stamina. New
inventions and miracles of production and an astonishing wealth, that staid
men of Europe never dreamed possible, sprang from the fervor of their unbounded
ambition. They turned useless prairies into golden wheat fields, their wagons
into powerful locomotives, and a savage wilderness into a network of commerce
and trade. Their tiny republic grew to be a colossus in face of a scornful
Europe still mired in the Old World that couldn't conceive of why men were
meant for liberty. Law was crowned as King, and all men were held to be equal
before it. Government conveyed privilege vanished, and men pursued a life
centered upon the individual for the first time in recorded history.

To such restless enterprising people, there was little on earth that was impossible.
All they wanted was to be free, to keep what they produced, and to seek their
destiny beyond the next horizon. They would work out their own security. "Just
let us be free," they insisted.

It was thus that a whole new philosophy came to be through the first stirrings
of these brave men and women. It was the philosophy of individualism,
and it stood in direct contrast to the accepted beliefs of Europe, which taught
men to seek security and subordinate themselves always to the dictates of the
monarch, or the feudal lords, or whoever had the power of the state behind
them. This new American philosophy declared that men were their own rulers,
that they were endowed by their Creator with free will, that they were responsible
for their own lives and possessed the power within them to overcome any obstacle.
It was a philosophy that exploded across a whole continent with the most dazzling
burst of hope and optimism mankind had ever seen. It transformed the world
and turned life into an evolving, mobile force for good instead of the stagnant,
autocratic ritual it had been for so much of human history.

For 125 years, Americans rigorously adhered to this remarkable idea of individualism,
and as a result, their prosperity grew to unparalleled heights. Life was meaningful.
Peace was the rule, men of good will abounded, and most important of all, the
free creativity of sovereign beings was everywhere.

Beginning in the early 20th century, however, a great many Americans began
to betray the individualist principles that had served them so well. And by
the start of the 1930's, the old primitive concept of statism, dominant
throughout the monarchist age in Europe, began to reemerge. America's free-market
philosophy came under attack. Men and women were collectivized into chess pieces
to be maneuvered by social engineers. Gold was deemed to be anachronistic;
paper money a miracle salvation. The income tax, scorned by stalwart Americans
for 150 years, became "acceptable policy" for modern times to feed burgeoning
bureaucratic appetites.

As a result, our Federal Government has grown into a dreadful omnipresence
as we begin the 21st century; life has become less and less meaningful; peace
has become the exception; men of good will have shrunk from sight; and that
ever so vital sovereignty of being has faded in face of the spreading
ministrations of the welfare state.

The fundamental question we face now is: Can the philosophy of individualism,
inaugurated by Jefferson, Smith and Locke, survive? Or is it to wither away
under the ever-swelling shadow of a monster government and the womb to tomb
security its social engineers are forcing upon us? Are we as a people to just
passively accept being humble wards of the state and underlings to Washington's
feudal lords who direct its encroachments, or do we still possess enough of
that spirit that founded America to overthrow such trespassings upon the basic
rights of man? Do we, as human beings, still value freedom; or is it really
state regimentation that we seek down deep in some craven corner of our souls?

Americans for a Free Republic

I believe the American people still possess the spirit that founded America.
It is battered and hidden in the recesses of their minds, suppressed by decades
of socialist/fascist propaganda in their schooling. It is difficult to detect.
But it is still there, and it can be reawakened.

What is required, however, to bring about such a reawakening is a dramatic,
revolutionary challenge to the Demopublican power structure that will explain
to the American people the roots of our political-economic problems instead
of glossing over their symptoms.

I have written about such a challenge in a recent article, "Gold Money and
Equal Tax Rates," in which I propose the formation of a Third Party (the Liberty
Party) to confront what the disgraceful Democrats and Republicans are doing
to our country. But it is not to be a conventional Third Party; it is to
be totally different from all those formed in the past. It is to be based upon
two simple planks -- radical monetary reform and radical tax reform. It
is to employ a unique strategy designed to avoid the two crucial mistakes of "marginalization" and "cloning" that
all third parties fall victim to, and which doom them to automatic defeat.
In my article, I also proposed forming an educational organization -- Americans
for a Free Republic -- to promote such a cause.

Americans for a Free Republic (AFR) is now a reality, and we have a scintillating
website up to spread our message. Our website is meant to be a RALLYING POINT
around which all lovers of freedom throughout the world can coalesce. It is
meant to be a revolutionary force that can gather together the talent, money,
and ideas to challenge the black limousine crowd in Washington and finally
end their monstrous Leviathan.

4) How gold money and equal tax rates are the weapons to bring this
about.

5) How we can stop the growth of Big Government cold.

As noted above AFR's goal is educational; it is not to ACTUALLY FORM the Liberty
Party. That will come later by the appropriate professionals and operatives
skilled in such matters. We are only interested in educating people about the
necessity of doing so along the lines of our innovative "two pillars strategy." We
plan to build a massive constituency of prominent, influential, educated, rebellious
Americans -- a vanguard to spread throughout the country, to do the actual
selling of the idea of a Third Party based upon "gold money and equal tax rates." We
wish to be the hub of the wheel that generates thousands of spokes (dedicated
activists) that branch out and proselytize all the people in their respective
spheres of influence.

Our site content is geared toward the intelligent reader and viewer. We don't
wish to try and educate the masses. We wish to reach the intelligentsia of
society, who then will sell their fellow intelligentsia. Once a sizeable portion
of this group has been won over, the masses will follow.

Who are the intelligentsia? All those of you in this world who understand
the power of ideas in the unfolding of history. You may be a teacher, a scholar,
a pastor, an entrepreneur, a banker, a soldier, an artist, a publisher, a moviemaker,
a laborer. But whatever your calling, the one common fabric you share is the
understanding that ideas matter, that history moves toward the good because
of RIGHT IDEAS, and that it moves toward evil because of WRONG IDEAS. It is
fallacy and sophistry that are the main precursors to dictatorship.

This is the nature of all mass movements in history. This is how the American
Revolution was launched. Only a small portion of the colonists were actually
for independence from Britain at the time. But they were the intelligentsia
-- influential, prominent, educated, and rebellious. They were leaders in their
personal spheres of influence. Their cause began in the 1760's via Patrick
Henry in Virginia along with Samuel Adams, John Hancock and the Sons of
Liberty in Massachusetts. The Sons of Liberty got together every month
or so in the local taverns of Boston, and then expanded their gathering in
the early 1770's to Boston's famous Old South Meeting-house where thousands
of fellow rebels joined to show their true colors to the Tories. Out of this
came the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773, which led to Lexington and Concord
-- "the shot heard around the world" -- and full-blown revolution. It was the
Sons of Liberty acting as the hub of the wheel, and the intrepid spokes they
established, that set the colonies on fire with the desire for independence
from Britain. It was their provocative thinking and firebrand personalities
that spread the idea of revolution throughout the land.

AFR hopes to become today's Sons of Liberty, to convince the American people
to abandon the despotic Demopublican policies of PAPER MONEY and PROGRESSIVE
TAXES -- to restore gold backing to our currency and eventually abolish
all forms of income taxation. This is to be done through an innovative
Third Party strategy that will force the enactment of radical monetary and
tax reform. The New Sons of Liberty will come from every walk of life; but
the inspiration that will bring them together will be their love of liberty
and a resolute refusal to kowtow to the contemptible shams of Demopublicanism.

Actually AFR is not laying the groundwork for a Third Party, but for a Second
Party. We mean to adamantly challenge the statist establishment in America
(which is the one-party monopoly of Demopublicanism). There are several million
potential AFR patriots out there -- highly intelligent and desirous of "doing
the right thing" in life. All of these patriots are leaders in their workplaces,
their communities, their churches, their myriad spheres of influence. Perhaps
you the reader are one of them. AFR's goal is to convince you that the right
thing to do is to withdraw your sanction of Gargantua's welfare state. Our
website http://www.afr.org hopefully will
become a modern version of Boston's Old South Meeting-house where all members
of AFR can coalesce to renew their spirit, to use as a recruitment tool for
others to join the fight just as the original Patriots did in the years leading
up to 1776. Once the country's intelligentsia has been won over to our cause,
then the masses will follow and the Demopublican regime will crumble like the
Berlin Wall.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that, "A man must become a part of the action and
passion of his times, lest he be judged not to have lived." The goals of AFR
will thrust its members squarely into the action and passion of our times,
which we feel are destined to become the most tumultuous to descend upon our
nation since its beginning. We seek the doers, the dissidents, the contrarians
to join our hub and build a New Sons of Liberty for the 21st century. There
are still numerous Berlin Walls to bring down.

We are far from a majority in America today, but as Samuel Adams told his
fellows in 1773 in the build-up to the Boston Tea Party, "It does not take
a majority to prevail...but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting
brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." Herein lies the goal of AFR.
We intend to set brushfires of freedom throughout America. We intend to spread
those brushfires until the flames and heat of resistance are so intense that
Washington's tyrannical elites can no longer continue their usurpation of our
rights. While the Clintons, Bushes, Rubins, Cheneys and Rumsfelds of today's
America are different in method, they are basically the same in principle to
Mikhail Gorbachev and Nicolae Ceausescu of yesterday's Russia and Romania.
AFR intends to see that such Washington elites meet the same fate as their
communist counterparts. While we do not intend to duplicate the Romanians treatment
of Ceausescu, we certainly intend to duplicate the Russians' refutation of
the weasel-tyrant Gorbachev. And we mean to extend such refutation to all future
Demopublicans.

The AFR View of Government

Our Republic, as originally conceived, was meant to allow men to live their
lives as sovereign beings, to trade peacefully, and to interact voluntarily
in the absence of government control. To accomplish this, the Founding Fathers
wrote a Constitution that described precisely in what areas the government
was going to utilize its power. For the first time in history, government was
to be strictly limited by law. Its use of police and legislative coercion
was not to be open to the tyrannical whims of kings, or the arbitrary meddlings
of planners, or the mass desires of the majority. Government was to do only
what was delegated to it and nothing more. It was to defend the country, preserve
the peace, and provide on the state and local level those few public services
that free individuals in a marketplace cannot functionally handle.

As we are now painfully aware, however, it was not a perfectly construc­ted
system, for there were certain powers granted to the government that should
never have been granted, and the Constitution that was created to limit such
powers possessed various loopholes and vague terminology that allowed the demagogic
to circumvent its limitations and swell the coercive power of the state. But
it was a magnificent beginning. Our Constitution was, and still is in conception
and meaning, the greatest single political work in the history of man.

Should it not then be our goal as a people to restore the original American
philosophy that valued freedom so highly and then set about to perfect it where
it was flawed? Is it not then our job to reduce the tyrannical power of our
government and once again allow men to live, trade and interact as they see
fit? If freedom is right and just for men to possess, why on earth are we
tolerating a government that will not allow us to be free? Why are we enduring
a bloated and arrogant bureaucracy that takes over half our earnings every
year and refuses to let us make our own choices in life? Why are we allowing
social engineers in Washington to dictate how our businesses are to be run,
where our children are to go to school, what prices we are to charge, what
wages we are to offer, who we are to employ, who we are to associate with,
what type of charities we are to support, what type of products we are to make
and sell, what we are to consume, how and when we are to retire, what is in
our best interests, and what is not in our best interests? Are we sons of the
heroes of '76 who pledged their lives and noble honor for the right to live
as indepen­dent men, or are we naught but modern day vassals to be formed and
cared for by condescending bureaucrats?

Can anyone imagine the Yankee traders of the 19th century allowing OSHA agents
to inspect their clipper ships to inform them that their safety precautions
for putting out to sea were not up to code? Would Jim Bridger, Sam Houston,
the prairie farmers, the cattle barons and all the rest of the men that tamed
the west, have allowed their congress­men to confiscate the huge percentages
of income we now tolerate so sub­serviently? How far does one suppose a bureaucrat
would have gotten if he had tried to tell the old stage coach drivers that
they must wear seat belts at all times while on the trail? What would the fiery
Patrick Henry or the robustious Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys be
doing in face of the onslaught of state welfarism that our "brave new worlders" are
sniveling so for today? Would not our ancestors be up in arms in face of the
legislative indignities that our politicians are perpetrating upon us everywhere?

If we as modern day Americans do not possess the spirit and the moral fiber
to face life on our own merits as our forefathers did, then what kind of life
have we really lived? If we do not possess the courage to want freedom, and
to fight for it as the Founders of this nation so heroically did, then what
kind of men and women are we? And if we are not to have the right to freedom,
what possible vestige of meaning can we then hope to find in our journey through
this world?

Where in the laws of our civilization is it said that humans are not supposed
to be free? Where is it said, with any resort to reason or justice or honor,
that freedom is to be a part time thing, to be planned and programmed
by an all-powerful bureaucracy? Freedom cannot be portioned out by government
officials in arbitrary doses in order to build what the statist mentalities
call a Great Society. It cannot be extended and then retracted, promised and
then betrayed as the Demopublicans are doing. Men's wealth is not Washington's
to hand out as it pleases to vocal minorities. Rights are not playthings to
be maneuvered according to public opinion polls. In America, freedom is
supposed to be INDIVISABLE. All men are supposed to possess an equal right
to freedom, and thus all men must be protected, treated and taxed equally by
the government whether they live in a penthouse or in a shanty, whether they
are black or white or green, whether they are tycoons or janitors, geniuses
or morons, heroes or hoboes.

Alll dictatorships and authoritarian societies that we see thriving in this
world today came to power by proclaiming their right to redistribute the productivity
of the people against their wishes, and to define freedom as the governing
elite sees fit -- all in order to erect a Great Planned Society. America has
been adopting the identical philosophy of such tyran­nies because her people
have been clamoring for more government redistribution of men's earnings. Yet
now that their lives are no longer theirs to live as they wish, these same
people lament the fact that government is too intrusive, too big, to all perva­sive,
and that their liberty is no longer respected.

Sooner or later we must come to grips with the fact that government is our
primary threat to freedom. We cannot be a free country with a growing arbitrary
government. If we are to be a free (and thus a just) country, we must restore
the strictly limited government envisioned by the Founders.

Such a limitation requires a strong breed of man, however, with a quality
of character and nobility of soul. It requires the willingness to get from
life only what one gives to life. There can be no egalitarian government programs
in the dreams of free men -- only the exhilarating lure of a life that justly
rewards our strengths and punishes our weaknesses -- only a grand and sprawling
market­place with the opportunity to pursue the glories that entice our passions
amidst the raucous goldfields of human progress.

A society of freedom is not for the timorous in search of the static life.
It is a vast, evolving carnival of ideological ferment and shooting star discoveries
-- where blockade runners defy tyrants, sodbusters grow up to be Presidents,
and drop out inventors startle mankind with entrepreneurial exploits never
before conceived. It is a poetic, existential pageant of burgeoning factories
and hullabaloo towns steeped in sultry glimmers of pulsating humanity and sirenic
romance ripening on the vines of quiet human courage. It is a providential
kaleidoscope of chance, and fate, and the excruciating salvation of being able
to stump the countryside for twenty years to finally realize one's aspirations.
It is a perilous Eldorado journey by stalwart men of ability, who know no such
word as fail and are willing to gamble their precious youth on liberating gifts
they intend to build for their fellow men. It is a hell-bent-for-leather life
where those born to risk garner mastodonic prizes, but where all levels of
men are raised up by the daring of these sodbusters, and glory seekers, and
gun running roman­tics, and shooting star inventors.

Such a grand and sprawling marketplace will by necessity be filled with chaotic
failure as well as riveting success, grim adversity as well as graceful comfort,
and crushing disappointment as well as sublime happiness. It will hardly be
perfect -- such a gaudy visionary society of heroic dreams and backbreaking
toil -- for men themselves can never be perfect. But it will be infinitely
richer in spirit, and material, and joy, and common decency than the drab oppressive
anthill society we see forming around us today.

This is freedom defined, and its restoration is the mission of AFR.
It's a tough demanding gift, this thing called freedom, which is why so many
today choose to distort its essence in shameless sophistry. But if there is
to be hearty and meaningful life for men on this earth, there must first be
freedom unadorned and clear. This is a timeless law of our existence -- never
to be tampered with.

Pillars of Truth

The political and philosophical principles that spawned America are not transitory.
They do not somehow melt away with the age of computers and high technology.
Ideas of this stature never fade; it is men's will that wanes. If we are stumbling
down the path to decay and authoritarian government, it is because we have
deserted the wisdom that first formed us.

AFR is an effort to recapture that wisdom and show that there do exist some
pillars of truth around which to build our lives. Not all is fleeting, incomprehensible,
and perverse. Our modern world does not have to be a mass bureaucratized world
where demagogic politicians and oligarchic judges dictate the conditions under
which we are to live. It can be a free and beautiful world where we determine
those conditions ourselves by the choices we make and the good we create in
the marketplace of manly endeavor. But only if we regain our reason, only if
we come to realize that individuals must be sacred and governments must
be servants -- for our times and tomorrow's times as well as those of
our ancestors.

AFR's message is simple and forthright: We must cease with the irrelevant
bickering over liberal-conservative picayune that makes up modern day political
dialogue, and we must restore gold money and fair taxation to our land.
Only in this way can we end the government's unlawful violation of our rights
to LIFE, LIBERTY, and PROPERTY. Only then will we be taking a step toward that
ideal we all are searching so for.

The American people are getting conned by slick, political authoritarians
who are attempting to smuggle our country into a one-world dictatorship. The
purpose of AFR is to unveil some of that con and to enlighten our fellows about
what must be done to stop the tyrannical drift that afflicts us. AFR is for
the independent of spirit, everywhere in every walk of life, who refuse
to live in subservience to governmental elites in far away Washington.

For all those men and women who still value the original legacy that our Founders
bestowed upon us, for those strong minded Americans of this dawning generation
who are not about to relinquish the world to the squalid intellectuality of
collectivism, there is a choice to be made and a great battle to be fought.
Our cause is about that choice and that battle. The stakes have never been
higher in our entire history. Come join us at the AFR Meeting-house http://www.afr.org.
Help us to defeat the dark forces taking over our lives. Help us to restore
the shining city on the hill that Jefferson and the Founders so brilliantly
envisioned.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas
and the Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republic www
.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as The Dallas
Morning News, Insight, The Freeman, Liberty, and The Social
Critic, as well as numerous Internet sites. He is the author of Why
We Must Abolish The Income Tax And The IRS (1997) and Breaking
the Demopublican Monopoly(2004). He is presently finishing a book on
political-economic philosophy entitled The Golden Mean: The Case for Libertarian
Politics and Conservative Values.